How to find the top news sources and journalists on Google News

Posted by Ken McGaffin on 21 December 2010

In his never-ending search for the best possible link prospects, Ken McGaffin talked to Neil Pharazyn, CEO of Newsknife to discover how to find the find the most influential targeted online news sources.

Having your company or website featured on Google News could bring you a lot of attention. Not only will people see the story directly, but if they like the story, other bloggers and commentators may write about it and that can bring you a lot of links.

However, some news sites and blogs feature more often in Google news than others. And some journalists have their stories featured many more times than other journalists.

So could targeting sites that feature more often in Google News listings help your story spread and bring you SEO benefits?

One company thinks so. Newsknife.com monitors news stories, sources and journalists and creates a rating for each, and the company makes that information available for just $10 for three months. Ken McGaffin talked to Neil Pharazyn, CEO of Newsknife in order to find out more.

Ken: How does Newsknife work?

Neil: Google News sorts the sources for each news story by 'relevance'. This puts the sources they think are the most relevant at the top, just like a Google search engine result. We consider this a rating of 'quality'.

Newsknife ratings combine each site’s quality rating with a monthly count of its appearances on Google News by each news site.

Using these Newsknife ratings, SEOs and online PRs can find the most influential news sources and target them.

Ken: What if I’m looking for specialist journalists who might cover my story (as I think everyone is)?

Neil: Google groups news items into sections and Newsknife notes the section name for each item, for example Entertainment. Currently you can see the results at Newsknife grouped in our journalist region-section ratings, not just for Google News US but all 22 English language Google News sites.

This is an invaluable and focused tool for journalists and SEO\PR experts who are interested in identifying a specific news section, for example top entertainment journalists (and their sites) ranked within the US, Canada, the UK and so forth.

Ken: Isn’t Google News dominated by the big news sites?

Neil: In recent years 20 major news sites have cornered an increasing share of the total Google News home page appearances. So it is an issue.

But there's definitely still room for 'the little guy'.

Newsknife finds around 100 new sites every month at Google News US. There's an SEO lesson in this. Often the new sites are specialists in some topic or for some region. They appear when there is a news story for that topic.

If your site - even if it isn't a news site - has something useful to say about that big event you could appear at Google News. But you've got to be right up to the minute on your topic, not after the event. And newsy. And expert.

Another major change at Google News is their wholehearted embrace of blogs, and masses of them. Newsknife has responded with our Top Blogs ratings. Each month we rate the blogs we've found and show their headlines.

This is a handy SEO and PR tool because you can see which blogs are hot and then click through to their original headlines. Once there you can comment on their blogs and with luck start a newsworthy relationship.

Ken: Do you rate writers as well as sites?

Neil: We do.

Google News gives the names of the journalists for many listings, straight after the name of the news site. That's what we use; 32,000 journalists so far across the 22 English language Google News sites. All top journalists, because why else would the sites proudly tout their names? As I noted before, we've rated them within each region/section to let you pinpoint the ones you're interested in.

Greg Jarboe of SearchEngineWatch.com recently blogged "If you'd like to pitch your story to a journalist who writes more articles that appear in Google News than any other journalist, then you'll love the new Newsknife ratings" . He added that the names of the journalists at the top of our ratings show that some news sites "know something about news search optimization".

Ken: Among your main customer groups are media sources, journalists, SEOs and PR professionals. What do you think each of these groups is after from Newsknife?

Neil: If you're a SEO or PR expert monitoring you can find clients and media contacts.

A number of our Members' Area subscribers come back year after year, which suggests we're on target. Subscribers range from owners of small regional sites to people working for the largest media networks. Here's one of the latter, their top SEO executive, saying "That (Newsknife) information is incredibly valuable".

Newsknife is a repository of news sites that have been qualified by the fact that they've appeared in Google News. They're worth approaching for PR, or to offer SEO services. The top-rating sites are particularly worth approaching.

Our rating of 'New Sites Found Last Month' is a source of potential business.

Our rating of 'Top Blogs' is a good doorway to establishing PR relationships with influential bloggers.

Our 'Site Profiles' for the last 12 months let you see if any news sites appear to be slipping and in need of SEO help, or benefiting from such help. You can click through to their news items to study keywords and so forth.

Go to our journalist ratings for categories like 'Entertainment', worldwide. To learn more about any journalist there do an automatic Google search on their name + "blog Facebook Twitter YouTube 'Google News'". And click to their latest stories that we've found.

News site owners and journalists visiting Newsknife for the first time usually head for our free lists of the sites and journalists we have found at Google News. Our rating of 'New Sites Found Last Month' also intrigues.

Media sources - site owners, media staff, bloggers - seem to largely head into our Members' Area to monitor their appearances on Google News, often in a very competitive way. Sites sometimes mention publicly when they have rated well at Newsknife. On the other hand when a site expressed disappointment at not doing well in a news subject into which they had put effort, we were able to study their and their competitors' actual source items to look for a reason.

Newsknife's 'Site Profiles' allow sites to track where we have found them on Google News, in considerable detail, monthly for the last 12 months. This gives them an indication of their changing fortunes at Google News. We show monthly figures, whether their performance has gone up in the last quarter, and their percentage of all the sites we found (in other words, the likelihood of them being seen in Google News when we visited).

Finally for visitors from media sources, our new journalism ratings let you see when we've found your journalists - and therefore your site - in all 22 Google News English language sites. This assumes that you are giving your journalists the appropriate bylines. And if you're hunting for a good journalist or stringer the Newsknife journalist ratings are a great place to go.